Verbal Duckface
“What should I do to overcome my fear of being judged?”
A girl I met in a bar last night asked me. She wanted to become a writer.
Look girl:
The “being judged” is not the problem. The problem is all the awful things the anticipation of being judged does to your writing.
See Instagram to see the “models” striking unnatural poses in unlikely places. See LinkedIn with all its useless “I’m humbled and honored to have received this ‘Advanced Screwdriver Operator’ certificate…” crap.
All that in the quest for approval.
If you want to write — and want to have the tiniest chance of your writing not being a total waste of your time — and even more importantly — waste of time of all those who might get to read it — you need to short circuit the instinct of trying to make your creation appeal to others.
See, there are all those books and movies about dictatorships that make people burn books. But in fact, there’s a lot of books out there that are total crap, and burning them would be an act of kindness.
If you don’t want your writing to be verbal duckface — if, when you’re writing, you ever find yourself thinking “what would they say about this?” run away, run away like you would when a stranger stops his car next to you when you’re walking a dark street late in the evening and in a quiet voice asks you if you could give him directions.
“But how can I do that,” she asked.
In that moment I ordered another drink.
“Why don’t we talk about something else?”
“You’re hopeless,” I added.
But only to myself.
